‘Poor Miriam,’ says Kim.
‘Poor both of them,’ says Colin, and Manon looks at him. Even Colin’s face has gone slack.
Sh e and Davy jog down the municipal stairs in silence, out to an unmarked car. Everything will be new territory for the Hinds now, a life before and a life after, and very soon that first life, the one untouched, will recede, like some blithe foreign landscape. That first life was when Manon used to read books with a torch under the duvet, the illicit thrill as her mother passed her door on her way to bed. That first life was one of lurching passions and furies, all played out against her mother’s solid breast. Not happy, exactly – she could never understand people who described their childhoods as happy. She looks across at Davy driving and thinks it’s probably how he’d describe his. Childhood seems to Manon (at least what she can remember of it), a time of frustration and effort, things that were frightening and new, and the retreat back into familiar comforts before the next foray.
Davy has pulled out onto the A14. The sky is a fragile blue, very far away, and the sunlight harsh and breakable and thin, sending its glassy shards through the windscreen so they both have to pull their visors down. They begin to leave the conurbation behind and the snow, which has all but melted in town, gains confidence the further they drive out into the Fens.
And then it happened. ‘Sudden Death Syndrome’, the coroner had said, and everything after it was another life, a new territory, one about to be discovered by the Hinds now that Edith was floating face down in the Ouse. And all the events of Manon’s life were played out in its wreckage.
Much of daily life for her fourteen-year-old self and twelve-year-old Ellie remained the same. Their father had been advised to keep the routines stable for the girls’ sake. School. Their bedrooms and the childish circus-print curtains their mother had chosen. Weekend swimming lessons. Crisps eaten on the back seat afterwards, the chlorine rising off their wet hair, their tights twisted wrongly about their sticky legs. Their father glancing back at them in the rear-view mirror, the seat empty beside him. They wandered helplessly through it, their rucksacks on their backs, gazed at by the more fortunate, their father never quite pre-empting their needs so that the shopping ran out and there was nothing to make a packed lunch with. Uniforms fished out of the dirty laundry basket and sniffed to see if they passed muster. They appeared to be functioning, did well in exams. Manon was top in her class because work, in comparison with living, was so easy. Reading was an escape. But she and Ellie were not – and she knew this even as a fourteen-year-old – intact, in the way other children were. There was a surface and then there was this gulf between it and their inner lives, shattered like a broken cup.
It was as if her mother had taken with her any strategy Manon ever had for living. When she got into Cambridge to read English, it was taken as a sign of success, as if no one could see it was a refuge. She hasn’t spoken to Ellie for three years now – a rift which has grown outwards in layers of resentment like rings in a tree. It began when Ellie broke with their sibling protocol: the wilfully immature hating of Una.
‘You went and stayed with them?’ Manon asked her, incredulous. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘Didn’t think I had to,’ Ellie said. ‘Una’s all right, once you get used to her.’
‘Una’s all right?’
‘Yeah, she is. You know, you have to fold the toilet paper to a point after you’ve pulled off a sheet, but apart from that—’
‘Judas.’
Davy pulls up the handbrake and they sit, listening to the car ticking. In the distance, she can see frogmen from Spartan Rescue milling about on the riverbank, and an ambulance, its back doors flung wide, a red blanket smoothed flat on a waiting stretcher. She sees the pathologist from Hitchingbrooke, Derry Mackeith, talking to a uniform.
‘I hate the smell of these,’ she says to Davy as they get out of the car.
‘MIT,’ says Mackeith, striding towards her from the riverbank. ‘To what do we owe this honour?’ The purple thread veins on his nose are livid in the cold and his breaths emerge as white puffs.
‘Is she out of the water?’ says Manon, trying to look past him, but the frogmen and Spartan Rescue officials are blocking her view.
‘She?’ says Mackeith. ‘It’s not a she.’
Manon looks at him. ‘What do you mean? Are you saying it’s not Edith Hind?’
‘Not unless Edith Hind was a young male of mixed race,’ says Mackeith.
‘I thought—’